Emotionally Valent Links Post

Zipfian Academy is like App Academy, except for data science instead of programming. If for some reason my medical career collapses, I’m doing this. If not for the price tag and impossibility of getting that much time off, I’d do it anyway, just for fun.

The excitement is not only at such a good idea, but at seeing the App Academy model expand into other fields. Maybe one day there will be Academies in every marketable skill, and people won’t have to go to college unless they really really want to accrue $100,000 in debt and waste four years of their lives getting drunk and sitting through General Ed bullshytte classes.

This isn’t the perfect model, since it still permits credential-olatry and the $16,000 price tag still locks out the disadvantaged. But a $16,000 credential sure beats a $100,000 credential, and if it catches on maybe it would accrue the same system of loans and scholarships.

I really like this idea. I am pretty sure that for most of my life, I never told anyone my crushes because it was always easier to put it off, say “I’ll definitely tell her sometime, but I don’t want to suffer the fear and anxiety today”. Meanwhile, summer fades to autumn, autumn into winter, and winter into now she’s dating some other guy plus we’re graduating soon anyway and it’s not worth the trouble.

There’s also something else I can’t quite put my finger on, some sense of “if I tell her out of the blue it will be really weird and creepy, I have to wait for an appropriate moment”. Of course this never came, or if it did I delayed it until the next appropriate moment because of the fear-and-anxiety thing.

This also fits into my plan to give the West a Japanese-style Golden Week. May Day, Star Wars Day, Cinco De Mayo, and Tell Your Crush Day. It kind of works. Spring, space battles, Mexicans, and love – the four corners of the human experience.

Terror Mixed With Weariness

In Right Is The New Left, I wrote:

I worry that soon they’ll start firing people for disagreeing with the idea that you should be able to fire people for disagreeing with ideas. Like, this could go uncomfortably far.

By “soon”, I meant “within the next couple of decades”. Well, the first person I know of who got fired for disagreeing with the idea that you should be able to fire people for disagreeing with ideas lost their job just under two weeks from the time I wrote that.

A big congratulations to Josh Olin for being the inaugural victim of a new meta-level of awfulness, and to the Game Revolution article for making sure to emphasize in their headline how the firing was “understandable”. I’m not mad. If it hadn’t included that, probably they would have fired whoever wrote the article.

Confusion

[trigger warning: rape]

You may have seen this article going around: Male Rape In America. It starts by informing people that despite popular belief, men are often the victim of rape, which is of course true and important and needs to be more widely known.

But it starts by saying that under traditional definitions, “in asking 40,000 households about rape and sexual violence, the survey uncovered that 38 percent of incidents were against men.

Then it adds that “When [cases of forced penetration] were taken into account, the rates of nonconsensual sexual contact basically equalized, with 1.270 million women and 1.267 million men claiming to be victims of sexual violence.”

As far as I know neither of these two estimates include prisons, which were previously the only place where rates of male rape were thought to approach the female background level.

While male rape is definitely more of a problem than anyone wants to let on, saying that the rate between sexes is basically equal – or even as near-equality of 38-62 – is astounding to me. The strongest argument against: men are overrepresented as perpetrators of every violent crime, therefore most rapists are probably men, and most men are straight.

Weirder still, Ozy points out that the yes answers to “have you ever been raped in your lifetime” trend disproportionately female as one would expect, but yes answers to “have you been raped in the last year” trend equal between sexes. This is the reverse of my expectation, where men might have experiences of molestation from childhood or rape from a term in prison but much less as community-dwelling adults.

I await replication with interest.

Guilt

Medical resident duty hour limits have been this constant war between “exhausted doctors make more mistakes” and “doctors who are working off handoffs make more mistakes”. The battles in this war are newspaper headlines about such-and-such a patient dying because a doctor made a mistake for such-and-such a reason. For a while, the people who wanted to limit duty hours to prevent exhaustion-related mistakes have had an insurmountable advantage, and right now there are very strict laws promising DIRE CONSEQUENCES to any hospital that makes residents work more than sixteen hours a day or eighty a week (uh…thanks, I guess).

I classify this under “guilt” because all of the older doctors where I work tell me about the time when Men Were Real Men and you worked thirty-six hour shifts and how nowadays we have it too easy and will never learn anything. Meanwhile, I am somehow managing to get out even earlier than the duty hours mandate (TODAY I LITERALLY WORKED A NINE HOUR DAY!?!) and feeling overworked and like I am surfing on the edge of burnout. This is totally feeding into my “you do not have what it takes to be a real doctor” phobia.

Amusement

TIL Hitler originally joined Nazis as gov agent to infiltrate them. That is SOME commitment to not blowing cover… http://t.co/VjNpLcMMq0

I feel like this would make a good metaphor for superintelligent AI. If you build an insufficiently-Friendly AI and tell it “discredit this organization”, you can be certain that the organization is going to end up very, very discredited, more discredited than anything else has ever been.

I’m not sure of the details, but as a community manager it’s likely his twitter was used to interact with the community, and so posting controversial tweets (while being seen as the company’s spokesperson) should be a fireable offence IMO.

I said the same thing about Adria Richards, when this issue got stirred up from the other direction.

If your community manager is igniting a community firestorm, they’re getting fired, because that’s the opposite of actually doing your job as a community manager. It doesn’t matter whether the comments are controversial by some objective measure or not (if anything, the more objectively reasonable the comments, the more poorly it reflects on their skills as a community manager that they managed to make a mess out of something that simple).

Well, the first person I know of who got fired for disagreeing with the idea that you should be able to fire people for disagreeing with ideas lost their job just under two weeks from the time I wrote that.

Even were it not the first, certainly a foreboding result.

More samples : The WorldCon idiocy is likewise not making me feel terribly happy about this behavior, even with the better responses by folk like Scalzi, it’s discouraging to see authors tested for far-from-extreme politics, and even worse for association with far-from-extreme politics. Even if I didn’t go both ways, I’d still very strongly dislike folk who advocate pour encourager les autres laws, so folk could convince me on the whole Orson Scott Card thing. But it’s less than a decade to go from that particular campaign to folk saying Larry Corriea and Sarah Hoyt make them feel unsafe because they’re not distant enough from Vox Day, and wow there’s a lot of grease on this slope.

Weirder still, Ozy points out that the yes answers to “have you ever been raped in your lifetime” trend disproportionately female as one would expect, but yes answers to “have you been raped in the last year” trend equal between sexes. This is the reverse of my expectation, where men might have experiences of molestation from childhood or rape from a term in prison but much less as community-dwelling adults.

Trigger Warnings : sexual assault and rape and age analysis, with all that implies
The full report (pdf warning) has some useful information. Note that the 2010 report is the first one to really use the “forced to penetrate” definition.

Possible explanations :
– Small numbers. The annual victimization surveys usually only turn up a 20-30 reports of rape in the last year: it doesn’t take much to throw the statistics out of whack.
– rape-of-men-as-defined-by-federal-law (being forcibly penetrated) /does/ generally target young men : the report says one quarter of males forcibly penetrated were under 10 at the age of the first completed rape. You may think of
these circumstances because they’re the ones reported until the 2010 addition of a “forced to penetrate” definition. On the other hand, other reports have historically found rates of men being sexually assaulted to be much lower than that of women, too, and there’s not as large of a definition gap, there.
– a relatively small number of men could be hypertargeted, either as being especially easy to attack or valuable to attack.
– Underreporting errors. Men are statistically more likely to have a number of psychological traits that downplay events, including memories of events, and this would affect the lifetime report rate.
– Overreporting errors. Margin of lizardmen is a politically unacceptable explanation in other similar contexts, but I’ve seen it raised here, and the result is far enough away from my priors to make it at least somewhat understandable.

Vox Day was previously expelled from the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) in a spat which involved an immense amount of accusations all around that I haven’t been able to penetrate through, but the core appears to be that NK Jemisin called Day a shitstain and a cancer on humanity, Day called Jemisin a half-savage whose people couldn’t build or maintain a civilization, and then a lot of people called Day a racist (because Jemisin is black) and a lot of other rude names, most of which Vox denies.

Vox Day is also a master troll: pursuant to the discoveries of neanderthal admixture, he said something like “not all of us are equal, not all of us are even fully homo sapiens” in one of the many arguments about racism, which COMPLETELY UNSURPRISINGLY was interpreted as “Day says black people are subhuman” when he had a plausible other meaning in “Day says some people are partly homo neanderthalensis”.

Day decided to get on the Hugo Awards (given at WorldCon) ballot for various reasons, likely including the abovementioned trollitude, and wanting to demonstrate that he doesn’t need the SFWA.

This let to a lot of rage and calls for political voting wherein Opera Vita Aeterna should ranked below No Award without anyone reading it, because Day is such a horrible person that downvoting him trumps voting on artistic merit.

The whole deal got some extra publicity because it coincided with the entire Wheel of Time series being ruled a “serialized work” and getting a nomination as a single novel, so there’s been cross-pollination of outrage across much of the SF/F community, and the whole thing deserves more explanation than this comment margin can contain.

Said Achmiz: That’s a little vague. 😉 I can’t tell whether you mean Vox is a horrifyingly horrible person, or that the people calling for political downvotes are horrifying, or something else.

Anonymous: gattsuru talked about “folk saying Larry Corriea and Sarah Hoyt make them feel unsafe because they’re not distant enough from Vox Day”, so I explained briefly who Vox Day was, why people wanted distance from him, and gave Larry Correia’s viewpoint. (I am unfamiliar with Sarah Hoyt.) Thus I tried to tie the matters back to the original post: Vox Day, like Donald Sterling, said some horrible things, Day was expelled like Sterling was fired (or whatever the NBA procedure is; I gather there’s some complications there too), Correia, like Olin, is taking heat for not distancing himself enough from Vox. I also explained what WorldCon was, and figured this would give people the background to understand what’s being talked about, as Said Achmiz requested.

I am truly puzzled by this because like… his book is named Warbound, Book III of the Grimnoir Chronicles, I am pretty sure judged solely on artistic merit that it ought to lose, we don’t need to be fussing around with arguments about how books by x-ist authors shouldn’t win or whatever. I mean. Grimnoir Chronicles.

It is probably worth acknowledging that the Correia campaign and the Vox Day campaign are not entirely separate. One reason people may be linking Correia with Day is that Correia explicitly recommended people nominate Day.

I’ve read Day’s novelette. It’s poorly written. He doesn’t pay attention to word choice — in the first couple of places, there’s a stretch where he uses “but” twice in two adjacent sentences. Worse, it’s the same “at first the narrator thought blah, but then blah” sentence construction.

It’s not that Correia isn’t distancing himself enough. It’s that he’s embracing Vox Day and recommending that people vote for a reasonably mediocre novelette.

Either way it is somewhat unbalanced to complain about people down voting Day for political reasons but failing to acknowledge that Day was nominated for political reasons.

his book is named Warbound, Book III of the Grimnoir Chronicles, I am pretty sure judged solely on artistic merit that it ought to lose

I’m not sure what your issue is with the name, but I can vouch that the Grimnoir Chronicles are awesome. It’s historical fantasy with really solid world-building. It’s also a clean trilogy which keeps the plot moving and wraps up all it’s major threads.

Correia’s politics don’t really infect it. He boasts in his blog about arranging for FDR to be a supporting villain, but he doesn’t have FDR do anything worse than the Japanese internment, so it’s fair.

Sarah Hoyt “came out” as conservative a couple years ago, and has (according to her) faced backlash because of it. I try to read her blog every one in a while just to get a view from the other side, but her writing is so long-winded that I usually stop after a few paragraphs.

I had to read up on May Day on wiki-pedia to verify that it was ever a holiday principally about spring.

Re: rape; Does this:
>But it starts by saying that under traditional definitions, “in asking 40,000 households about rape and sexual violence, the survey uncovered that 38 percent of incidents were against men.

Then it adds that “When [cases of forced penetration] were taken into account, the rates of nonconsensual sexual contact basically equalized, with 1.270 million women and 1.267 million men claiming to be victims of sexual violence.”

Imply that more rape of men is forcible penetration compared to rape of women? Strikes me as somewhat counterintuitive.

A much weaker claim is true – for example, that you can’t force a man to put his erect penis into something without causing it to be erect – which isn’t always a trivial task – but plenty of guys have had erections unwillingly. (Plenty of others have *lacked* erections unwillingly.)

Unless you want to claim that the will resides in the bodily process that controls the penis, not in the mind. Is that your point? Because if so, then I think you’re just referring to a totally different thing by the word “will.”

The cases I’ve actually heard about involve guys passed out drunk getting erections in their sleep. Ordinary sleep probably isn’t deep enough to get into position, but apparently alcohol-induced sleep is. I don’t know if the anecdotes I’ve collected are representative, but I have no reason to think they aren’t.

There are other possibilities. A penis can get hard from physical stimulation even if its owner doesn’t want to have sex. Especially from someone who is sexually attractive (just because a guy finds someone sexually attractive, it does not automatically follow he wants to have sex with them). There also exist fear-induced erections.

It’s possible to physically force an erection by tying a string tightly around the base of the penis. I just tested this. It’s not as hard as a arousal-induced erection, but it’s hard enough to force-penetrate. I’ve heard credible reports that you can do it by force-feeding viagra or by strangling, but those are too dangerous for me to test on myself.

Nor are all rapes by brute force. Demanding sex by a threat also counts. Someone who could never physically hold a victim down could still threaten him with a gun, or to get him fired from his job, or (for a female rapist who’s into irony) to publicly accuse him of raping her.

Of course you can; the body cannot follow something as subtle as “this stroking feels wonderful, but I really do not want X”. Or, an example you may like more, “I do not want X but zie has threatened to shout ‘rape'”.

Ozymandias, at first I thought, “haha good point,” but then I introspected and realized that when I’m engaging in sexual contact, I am mainly thinking:

Am I doing this right?
Am I performing this behavior correctly?
Is my partner pleased with this?
I hope they don’t notice that I’m a total fraud and just making things up.
I hope my body doesn’t respond to this in a deprecated or socially inappropriate way.

Those thoughts are loud enough that I have no space for:

Am I enjoying this?
Do I want to do this?
Is this something I’m okay with?

I certainly never think about whether I consent to the interaction. It’s just not something that occurs to me. I say no if I think that’s the socially correct thing to say. I might also say no if I thought I were in physical danger, but I am not sure because I have been lucky enough never to have to make that call. Otherwise, I just let things happen, and I don’t think I ever considered until very recently that it’s possible for things to be different.

(Anonymous for this one to avoid casting unfair aspersions. I’m a man, not one you’ve had sex with.)

Ibid: I actually had a similar experience for a fair amount of time with sex, and it’s taken a lot of personal work and some fairly supportive partners to get myself to a place where I actually am checking in with myself to be like “do I want to have sex, do I want to have sex with this person, am I just agreeing because Social Pressure,” etc. I really do recommend it though: generally sex is better when you want it as opposed to just letting it happen.

Thanks for sharing that. What does “better” mean and why would I want that, or want to want it? “More physically pleasurable” isn’t particularly appealing to me right now, but I’m open to wanting to want that.

(Just because I’m having this conversation, part of me right now is screaming “NONONONONO IF IBID DOES WHAT IBID WANTS, IBID WILL NOT AVOID ERRORS!” It’s probably a bad idea for me to try to change myself while another part of me is in a panic at the very thought of it.)

Also, what does “personal work” look like? Where would I find the procedural knowledge if at some point I did want to change this about myself?

I am getting the feeling that the use of the word “consent” has changed since the beginning of this subthread? I don’t mean to derail, but the equivocation seems like it could potentially be paranoid-guilt fuel, so I thought it was worth making explicit.

I worry that soon they’ll start firing people for disagreeing with the idea that you should be able to fire people for disagreeing with ideas. Like, this could go uncomfortably far.

Congratulations for noticing the movement left. I predict most of your fellows to believe it has always been this way, and indeed, that the fact that someone was so indescribably shocking as to disagree indicates a major movement right.

How far back do you think we can find an example of someone being fired because they disagreed with the firing of someone else over a moral panic? I mean, if it’s the product of a recent leftward movement, it should be a pretty recent innovation.

Though I notice that the term “moral panic” dates from 1830. What does wikipedia give for the definition of this dusty term? “Moral panics are in essence controversies that involve arguments and social tension, and in which disagreement is difficult because the matter at its center is taboo.”

But on the other hand, maybe it’s the “being fired” part that is a recent innovation. Maybe if you spoke out against the pogroms in 19th-century russia, rather than a small chance of getting fired from your job for insensitivity, there was instead a small chance of getting killed for being a crypto-jew. The censorers on the left aren’t breaking new ground so much as just doing the same old political behaviors in slightly more civilized clothing.

And since everyone knows that killing people is rightist while calling them insensitive to your culture is leftist, there has been a leftward shift over time.

In which case, I say “thank goodness for the shift away from killing people you disagree with.” You might even agree, though you’d call that a “movement left.”

You’re both wrong. On the one hand, better to compare modern America with 19th century Britain. Or the developed and urbanized parts of America. Plus repression does exist outside of actual severity. Imagine a world united in soft, gentle suppression as the SJWs only dream of, but against abortion, against collective communities, against the diversity of love and gender. I would cry to see it, and then throw it into the sea.

Otoh, I don’t think this represents a shift like many things do but a possibly unstable increase in unity.

Anthony is sarcastic – the phrase “modern moral developments” refers to the developments that lead to the recent firings under discussion.

But if you want a defense of the blacklist, nydwracu discusses each of the Hollywood 10. The most interesting point is that Maltz was threatened with expulsion from the Party until he recanted his position that not all art had to be propaganda. Which is not to say any of them gave more than lip service to said policy, but the organizing claim of the boycott, that Party artists produced communist propaganda, was not a paranoid delusion. Also one of the ten, Dmytryk, claimed that three of the others, including Maltz, pressured him to include propaganda.

Scott, do you legitimately think that firing people for having the “wrong” opinions is a new thing? This has always been something that is both a flaw and a virtue of the free market, that popularity rules the roost. If someone says something to make customers dislike your brand, the easiest way to deal with it is to drop that person. The only difference today is what exactly will get you fired. That particular aspect has clearly migrated left.

Has the problem gotten worse in recent years? I think that’s entirely possible. With the internet’s ability to shine a spotlight on every aspect of a person’s life, things that would have gone unnoticed are now getting them fired. It’s also possible that it’s not happening much more, but the cases where it does happen are more publicized, through that same medium. Overall, though, I don’t think it’s so much worse now than in the past that it’s something we have worry about overmuch.

Okay, I understand your position more now. I personally doubt that “getting people fired for believing people shouldn’t get fired for having the wrong opinion” is truly a new thing, but since I don’t really want to go searching for counter-examples, I’m not going to argue about it.

It is entirely possible that it has become more “malignant and triumphalist” recently, but since I haven’t personally seen it as being any worse now than when I have seen similar incidents in the past, I’m going to just say I disagree (without solid evidence to back me up) and bow out of the discussion.

That seems to me like a weird choice for comparison. There are so many other differences that might explain the difference in triumphalism. For one thing, the politics are opposite. But the key difference is that it was the act of an individual. A mob on the internet cannot be triumphant that its activism lead to a firing that occurred before it was posted.

TBH I have, over the past couple years, shifted to guiltily hoping the equal-prevalence numbers are right so that I get to watch male-survivor-exclusionary feminists rationalizing. (Plus: easiest way since TERFs to figure out which feminists are assholes.)

A strange subgroup of radical (deconstructionist, not necessarily extreme) feminists who see transsexuals as apostates on the one hand and dangerous infiltrators on the other. Tend to be remarkably cruel to a group that’s pretty vulnerable.

With regards to the difference in self-reported lifetime victimisation rates between men and women, the most common explanation I’ve seen is based on Widom and Morris’ 1997 study into recollection of childhood abuse. Asking adults who had been the victims of convicted child abusers (the nearest thing to a definite positive group we can get) whether they had been abused returned 16% of men and 64% of women describing themselves as having been abused. There was some age variance too, with longer periods producing both a smaller rate of recollection and a bigger gender variance.

The most obvious answer to me is that since men and boys are conditioned to consider unwelcome sex as a gift, they are vastly less likely to define themselves as having been abused and this effect magnifies over time. I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that Widom and Morris’ 4:1 ratio is almost the same as the ~4:1 lifetime ratio found in the NISVS data, although I’m mildly perturbed and suspicious about just how perfect the fit is.

Ozy – my experiences have been much more that male-survivor-exclusionary feminists have mostly spent their time trying to pretend the statistics aren’t real. One of them actually called the stats “MRA assfax”. There’s been some rationalization too, as they try desperately to shore up the “men are all fundamentally physically and sexually violent against women as a culture-wide campaign of control and terror” narrative they’ve spent the last 40 years building in the face of the ever-growing evidence of parity in sexual and intimate violence, but mainly they just yell “Fedora!” and put their fingers in their ears.

The important big difference between Zipfian and App Academy is the payment model, where a/A only charges if you get a job, which means that the incentives line up better.

And the credential-olatry is being held at bay for the moment by the lack of credibility of these bootcamps. That will go away in a few years as they build up a reputation, but for the moment it’s great. It’s hard to describe the beauty and shock of being in an educational environment with zero value on the credential: you realise that there’s no point just scraping by, because no-one will hire you if you don’t know the material.

As far as I know neither of these two estimates include prisons, which were previously the only place where rates of male rape were thought to approach the female background level.

Oh, hey, I know this one.

The overwhelming majority of studies of rape define rape as “forcible penetration,” i.e. cases where the victim was forcibly penetrated by the offender. This means the overwhelming majority of studies which look at rape get really skewed results (female rapists rarely forcefully penetrate their victims, since they get no physical pleasure from that action).

I am not quite at the point of the “lifetime should be equal, it must be under-reporting.” I tend towards the “male rapists move from victim to victim, female rapists latch their claws into one guy and do it over and over” (well, actually, I tend towards a mix of that, rising/falling rates, and under-reporting, but with an emphasis on that one) since this is a) consistent with male-female mating patterns in general, and b) consistent with I saw that looked at the number of sex partners identified sexually coercive individuals have – in that study, male rapists had many more sexual partners than female rapists (but unfortunately I couldn’t find it because it’s been probably a year or more since I read this stuff in-depth; this one has some cites of its own confirming male rapists tend to have more sexual partners, but I can’t find the one I’m thinking of, which didn’t find a significant difference in the number of sex partners of sexually coercive women from their non-coercive equivalents).

“Replication” study, incidentally. 2.3% college women in a bunch of different countries versus 2.8% college men in a bunch of different countries were the victims of the forced sex in the past year (nss as far as I could tell).

I have some doubts that telling a limerent object about one’s state is a useful strategy for anything except never being able to interact with them again so that the limerence will be forced to fade. Is it?

What I had thought is: if they liked you back, you wouldn’t be in that kind of position in the first place. And chances are that if they vaguely liked you before, they won’t like you after because explicitly declaring that sort of thing, instead of playing the Russian spy game, is socially inept and unattractive.

But now I realised that this was a very male-centered perspective. It seems rather more likely that a man wouldn’t notice that a woman is in love with him, and also women aren’t likely to be socially punished by men for failing at the spy game.

You would be surprised at how often “hey, I think you’re really awesome” leads people to be attracted to you. I mean, think about it from your own perspective: if a girl you weren’t really interested in came up to you and said “I have a crush on you,” wouldn’t you at least give her a second look?

Women tend to try the telepathy method of letting guys know they’re into them. I do not know why they do this, it is the stupidest thing. But this means that you cannot assume that a woman doesn’t want to date you just because she has given no discernible signs of wanting to date you. I know, this is the dumbest, you should at least give thanks you’re not dating lesbians. (True story: two girls I know discussed ahead of time that they wanted to go have sex, one went over to the other girl’s house, they hung out for four hours, and they didn’t kiss because they were both too scared to initiate. Girls are dumb.)

I guess my advice is “try to avoid known failure modes, but in order to get a sense of what things creep girls out and what don’t, you are going to have to try out various things, and part of the trying-things-out process is making mistakes and failing. Thus, you will probably creep girls out occasionally, and you will probably be more successful dating if you figure out how to be okay with that.”

Of course they’ll survive, but they might go on the internet and talk about how you’re terrible, and also tell all their friends that you’re terrible, and creepy and rapey.* Because getting creeped out is the worst thing, and if a guy creeps you out, that definitely means that he’s probably going to rape you, first chance he gets.

* This hasn’t ever happened to me, but the internet sure works hard to make it seem like this happens all the time.

Women tend to try the telepathy method of letting guys know they’re into them. I do not know why they do this, it is the stupidest thing.

Two related reasons. First, current social norms discourage women from approaching men because then they look too interested and therefore “desperate”. Second, some men feel that when they’re approached by a woman, their masculinity is being questioned because social norms say that the guy is supposed to initiate.

You would be surprised at how often “hey, I think you’re really awesome” leads people to be attracted to you. I mean, think about it from your own perspective: if a girl you weren’t really interested in came up to you and said “I have a crush on you,” wouldn’t you at least give her a second look?

I am, indeed, surprised to hear this. Not because what you say isn’t completely true of myself; but because I wouldn’t have thought that it’s remotely true of the vast majority of women.

It’s perhaps worth noting here that feminists have spent a lot of time inadvertently convincing people that if a particular woman is not already interested in you, they never will be, and there is absolutely nothing you can do to affect this.

Not the message they wanted to spread, obviously, because when you put it that way it sounds obviously absurd; just yet another case of “we didn’t think through the implications of what we were saying and asserted something horribly overbroad instead of the more narrow statement we actually meant”.

You would be surprised at how often “hey, I think you’re really awesome” leads people to be attracted to you. I mean, think about it from your own perspective: if a girl you weren’t really interested in came up to you and said “I have a crush on you,” wouldn’t you at least give her a second look?

Confirmed that I have, when confronted with knowledge of a crush, definitely reëvaluated my opinion of the crusher, usually in their favor. I usually learn about it just as they’re leaving, though, which is frustrating as all get out. (A particularly notable incident was someone inserting such a statement into their signing of my school yearbook, on the last day of class, when we both knew that we were both transferring to different districts entirely the next year.)

When I’ve crushed on someone, I haven’t explicitly told them about the crush, but have occasionally started up standard hey-lets-date interactions, with standard results (a pretty normal mix of rejection and acceptance).

Of course they’ll survive, but they might go on the internet and talk about how you’re terrible, and also tell all their friends that you’re terrible, and creepy and rapey.* Because getting creeped out is the worst thing, and if a guy creeps you out, that definitely means that he’s probably going to rape you, first chance he gets.

* This hasn’t ever happened to me, but the internet sure works hard to make it seem like this happens all the time.

Pretty sure this is just internet legend. Honestly, how many men can you recall *ever* getting outed on the internet as being creepy? The most notorious outing (elevatorgate) was *anonymous*, so not an outing at all.

I think some people (including you) just generally absorbed a *feeling* that creepy people get talked about on the internet, when in reality that sort of thing almost never happens.

Now, talking to their friends is a different story. Yeah, that kind of thing might happen. And oh well. If you’re scared of poisoning social circles, try to start your experimentation in brand new circles instead, separated from your normal social life. (I did the standard thing of doing all my learning in middle/high school, so those social circles died out entirely by the time I grew up and any record of my mistakes was lost forever. You probably don’t have the option of doing that any longer, and I don’t recommend hitting on high-school girls as a substitute. ^_^)

(Really, this is just the standard “try some new hobbies, and see who you meet” advice, because it’s actually quite good advice.)

I have been noticing a lot this pattern that any man who describes his lived experiences invariably gets accused of strawmanning and bringing up Internet rumors and things that never REALLY happen in real life.

I have been noticing a lot this pattern that any man who describes his lived experiences invariably gets accused of strawmanning and bringing up Internet rumors and things that never REALLY happen in real life.

I, a man, have described my lived experiences plenty of times, and have never gotten accused of bringing up Internet rumors and things that never REALLY happen in real life. So your theory seems a little bit on the strong side.

This is making me very much want to write a story where a character finally overcomes their reservations and confesses their feelings to the person who secretly feels the same way about them, and it goes horribly wrong in the worst plausible way.

Is a crush the same thing as limerence? It didn’t quite seem like it from the website’s description.

I think part of the reason the presentation of “International Tell Your Crush Day” makes me so anxious is that I am not quite sure how to tell whether I have a crush on someone, and am scared of making a Type I error and making someone think I have feelings that I don’t quite, or a Type II error and letting someone who knows I know about ITYCD accumulate additional misleading evidence that they are an unappealing person.

Implying, of course, but that’s a very different thing. I share Sniffoy’s doubt about the original assertion. Judging by my own experience and general impressions, many (I don’t know if most) relationships start after a period of playing the Russian spy game followed by someone kissing someone when they are sufficiently certain the attraction is reciprocated.

It seems likely that there would be cultural differences in that area, too.

Most relationships that exist must have started with one person telling the other they liked them, right?

I feel that you are possibly correct in this assertion. But what other ways of relationships coming into existence are there?
“Come here, son, meet your bride.”
“We’ve been friends for so long that everyone thinks we’re dating, want to make it real?”
“Hey, twenty bucks to be my girlfriend?”
“Hey friend, I’m gay but I need a boyfriend for cover. Want to be my beard?”EDIT:http://leftoversoup.com/archive.php?num=478

“Forced to penetrate” usually means that women raped men, slatestarcodex. This research about the equality of sexual assault HAS been replicated, many times. But guess who does rape research? Guess what doesn’t count as rape and is disregarded? You guessed it.

She gives two reasons for her definition of rape. 1. She followed the UCR so you could compare her numbers to others. 2. She used the same definition of rape as last year, so the time series would be useful.

Have you ever considered that there might be a purpose to surveys and statistics other than political lobbying?

>1. She followed the UCR so you could compare her numbers to others.
Yes, which is why every time people hear about male sexual victimization, they’re surprised at the numbers. Incredulous, even. Male rape doesn’t exist, just “forced to penetrate.” Weird about this forced to penetrate thing, though, seems an awful lot like rape. Oh we did it that way to more efficiently collect statistics. What did you statistics show? That male rape doesn’t exist!

>2. She used the same definition of rape as last year, so the time series would be useful.
And what has it been used for?

>Have you ever considered that there might be a purpose to surveys and statistics other than political lobbying?
Indeed I have. Have you? What were these statistics used for?

This video has a weirdo anti-Mary-Koss agenda. Like… is there any evidence that It is common in rape research, *including* in NISVS which gives the equal 12-month prevalence numbers, to ask “have you been forced to have sex or had sex when you were unable to consent because of the use of drugs or alcohol?” instead of asking ‘have you been raped?” This is because it is common for people to be in denial about whether they were raped, particulary for men, which makes me somewhat irritated that the video chose to use that particular talking point. I’m also not sure why they’re blaming Mary Koss for the CDC’s definition– I can’t find anything that suggests she did that on Google, although she has consulted for the CDC. NISVS is actually *much* more progressive than NCVS or the UCR because it counts made-to-penetrate victims at all, as sad as that is.

I’m also leery about blaming the erasure of male rapists on feminists. The rape of men wasn’t counted as rape since long before the feminist movement was a twinkle in Susan B. Anthony’s eye. For most of history, rape has been a crime men committed against chaste women they weren’t married to. Feminists questioned the “chaste” and “weren’t married to” parts, but bought into the gender. The problem is not that feminists are being too feminist, it’s that they’re being sexist assholes.

I also disagree with anonymous– while comparing definitions over time is important, it is far *more* important that we have a definition of “rape” in line with the commonsense “forcing someone to have sex is rape.” The undercounting of male rape survivors leads to concrete harm for male survivors, ranging from misallocation of resources to feeling like they’re the only one out there. I think anon is quite justifiably angry to be honest!

>I also disagree with anonymous– while comparing definitions over time is important, it is far *more* important that we have a definition of “rape” in line with the commonsense “forcing someone to have sex is rape.”
I don’t actually care what it’s called, if it counts. There is a very rapidly-reached limit to how much naming things helps disseminate information. But I think the general incredulity about “men and women are equally likely to report being sexually assaulted” stats shows that something is not being accurately portrayed. I don’t even care who is to blame. I just want change. No one needs to be nailed to a wall for this to happen, I’d like to think.

They’re not actually equally likely to report being sexually assaulted, women are comfortably ahead in sexual assault (which includes frex groping). See, this is why definitions are important. 😛

I think the fact that made to penetrate isn’t defined as rape matters, because it’s the rape statistics and not the made-to-penetrate statistics that are put on all the Take Back the Night posters, you know? People will turn these complex statistics into a soundbite, and I want the soundbite to be something that shows how many male rape survivors there actually are.

You can put whatever statistic you want on the poster. You can even fabricate it out of whole cloth – people do it all the time. The person writing the poster probably isn’t reading the CDC, you should try to get on their reading list and stop worrying about the CDC. It came up on a previous thread that news coverage always turns the CDC’s “autism spectrum” into “autism.” News coverage is less consistent about turning “sexual assault” into “rape,” but it is quite common. Whether it picks up this category probably doesn’t depend on what the CDC calls it, but on whether it wants a story about rapes of men, or whether that’s too weird.

RAINN mainly uses NCVS, not NISVS. Mainly it uses the most recent 2012 survey, but for counting the proportion of male victims it uses 2003. Of course the 2012 number is exceptional, and it would be reasonable to use a 10 year average for everything, but this suggests that it does not simply accept whatever numbers and definitions its sources use.

ozymandias:
>They’re not actually equally likely to report being sexually assaulted, women are comfortably ahead in sexual assault (which includes frex groping). See, this is why definitions are important.

Sorry, this is too deeply nested to reply properly (?) so I am just responding to my own post. Thank you for correcting me. See how seductive common expressions are? I think this is almost the problem: trying to narrow the definitional context of everyday expressions. If the statistics just studied “forced penetration” and “forced to penetrate” there would be almost no possibility for actual soundbiting by unscrupulous or unintentionally stupid parties. But instead one of these two groups somehow gets to claim the word “rape.” I can’t get away with this on “sexual assault”, that’s just my own screw up.

>People will turn these complex statistics into a soundbite, and I want the soundbite to be something that shows how many male rape survivors there actually are.

>The problem is not that feminists are being too feminist, it’s that they’re being sexist assholes.

Highly important sentence here, I felt it deserved bringing out on its own.

That said, the narrative of rape-as-gender-terrorism as part of an organised gender control system designed to force women into their submissive role is 100% feminism. As written about in numerous papers and articles written by Gender Studies academics. And, in the face of the statistics, completely untrue.

The problem, as ever, does not come from one source; it’s much more the case that the inherent sexism of large numbers of feminists intersects with both anti-male sexist attitudes in society (males cannot be victims, males can only be perpetrators, males always want sex) and gender oppression narratives created by individuals unable to perceive or understand oppressive gender roles that didn’t apply to themselves.

However, feminism has been in the process of deconstructing that for a while; early attempts at crudely appropriating male issues by declaring them the result of patriarchy (apparently without any irony) are starting to give way to more thoughtful articles like the one above. And the whole “men are rapists and murderers and that’s all they are” thing has mainly passed out of the mainstream.

So I think Ozy’s summary is fair; this is about sexist idiots being sexist idiots, not about feminism in itself. That’s a different, and more complicated, question.

Hello Zorgon. I wonder if you have conflated different uses of “sexist” in your post, constructing a convenient narrative of your own. That is, specifically, conflating stereotypical gender roles—let’s say, descriptive sexism—with the discriminatory kind—your “sexist idiots.” The MRA-styled groups and the feminist-style groups are both at a minimum sexists of the first kind, and attract sexists of the second kind, but don’t want to admit they’re sexists of the first kind because they feel (rightly, in my view) that this will be confused for them being sexists of the second kind. Leading to an “advocate of the gaps” kind of wishy-washy narrative like you end your comment with:
>this is about sexist idiots being sexist idiots, not about feminism in itself. That’s a different, and more complicated, question.

Actually is it advocate of the gaps, or no true advocate? Hmm.

Anyway, I don’t believe this is so. There’s a reason each party considers themselves “feminists” or “male rights activists” rather than just “humanists” or some other gender-neutral word. Gender really is the focus. Both sides would like to think that they can balance the teeter-totter by pushing down on only one side but I think you will agree this is not possible, neither in the analogy, nor in the real case.

@anon – It’s not quite conflation. I’m firmly of the opinion that both feminists and MHRAs are rotten through with the “type 2 sexists” you describe, and that they use conventional gender roles to shore up their existing prejudices against the opposite sex. There’s a reason I referenced long-enshrined academic feminist dogma regarding gendered violence in my comment; this stuff is not nearly as peripheral as many fluffier feminists would like to pretend it is. That MHRAs are much smaller, less academically prevalent and have less built-up dogma doesn’t protect them from this problem either, as can be demonstrated by a 5 minute trip to A Voice For Men.

It’s one thing to believe that feminism is the radical notion that women are people, and quite another to believe that the entirety of male society engages in a concerted and deliberate campaign of violence against women in order to suppress them. Likewise, it’s one thing to believe that men deserve the same access to basic legal rights now afforded women (the right to bodily integrity, the right to a fair trial and fair sentencing, the right to equal protection under the law), and quite another to believe that all of feminism is a giant conspiracy intended to destroy masculinity and impose a matriarchy by stealth.

(Besides anything else, I have no doubt whatsoever that there are plenty of people who believe that men and women are both people and that all people deserve access to basic legal rights. I’d find it very hard to cast “Disbelieve” on myself.)

The word we’re groping around here is “egalitarian”, and it’s quite possible to overlap it with any of the usual suspects to indicate a tendency towards the less blatantly sexist areas of discussion. “Egalitarian Feminist” isn’t a misnomer for people who actually believe in equality AND in improving the lot of women. Likewise “Egalitarian Men’s Human Rights Activist” for men. There’s nothing at all stopping anyone having a deep belief in equality and still agitating for a particular group. Context is everything.

“Humanism”, on the other hand, is as you say, a non-gendered concept. It usually *includes* egalitarianism, but the two things aren’t interchangeable. One of the things that I found hilarious about the Atheism+ kerfuffle was that Humanism (big ‘H’) has been a gender egalitarian, racial-equality driven and generally deeply social liberal atheistic belief system for decades, but apparently wasn’t sufficiently in-group for the specific clique in question. No, they wanted to start their OWN humanism, with blackjack and hookers, and nothing else would do!

I told you that most of your fellows would believe that nothing has changed, that we were always this repressive, that McCarthyism was this repressive, that the witch burners were this repressive, that Elizabethan England was this repressive.

And lo and behold, in the comments we see lots of people declaring “I cannot be bothered to find examples but I am sure that lots of people were fired for opposing the Hollywood blacklist”

All these examples that people are sure exist, but cannot be bothered to produce.

Defining “rape” to mean all forms of sexual assault causes problems. In the jail where I worked, the “Prison Rape Elimination Act” forbid all forms of sexual activity. I saw people get genuinely confused when they were punished for something like kissing or sexual comments because “I didn’t rape anyon! It says rape in the name!” Explaining “It says rape, but it means all sexual activity” did not go very far.

When gender studies types redefine “rape” to mean something broader than everyone else understands it to be, it creates confusion and doesn’t seem to do much to prevent other forms of sexual assault.

There is a very important difference between “kissing is rape” and “nonconsensual PIV is rape.” The former is indeed non-central, but the latter is the central example of rape, and it seems deeply sexist that it is not considered rape when a man is the victim.

I know why there are about as many male “forced to penetrates” as female “rapes.” The numbers are based on the 2010 CDC survey. If you look at their methodology, you see that they count all instances of sex while very drunk as “rape.” If you include these, you water down you statistics with lots of instances of men and women simultaneously raping each other. And assuming men have sex while drunk more often than women do, will biased in the direction of men being raped.

As for the discrepancy between “lifetime” and “last year,” I hypothesize that lifetime is watered down by the above significantly less. Additionally, due to younger women having sex with older men, the statutory rapes will be more common for women, and will show up in “lifetime” but not “last year.”

I think that the take away is not that men are actually raped more than women, but the CDC source is not very good. This is the same source feminists often quote which says 1 in 5 women raped in lifetime, 1 in 71 men raped in lifetime. If you don’t actually read it, you might miss the fact that their “rape” does not include men being forced to penetrate.

Cute trivia: Those numbers are so close together that they are closer than the ratio of the male population to the female population. Therefore, according to the CDC, if you are an American adult, then being a man is evidence in favor of you being raped or forced to penetrate within the next year. (The probability is 1.11% for men and 1.05% for women)

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